By Yi Whan-woo
South Korea, the United States and Japan will seek to address North Korea’s exploitation of its workers abroad in a U.N. resolution on Pyongyang’s human rights violations, diplomatic sources said Sunday.
The U.N. General Assembly has passed several resolutions denouncing Pyongyang’s state-perpetrated crimes against humanity since 2005.
The allies are seeking to include the North’s exploitation of hard labor in this year’s resolution, which is expected to be put to a vote in December.
The European Union and Japan recently drew up the draft resolution together and plan to submit a final version to the U.N. for review after consulting details with relevant countries. The draft is likely to ask the U.N. Security Council to refer those responsible for human rights violations to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands.
This will be the first time for the international community to lay the legal groundwork to accuse the Kim Jong-un regime of exploiting its overseas laborers.
The international move concerning the North Korean workers came amid the U.N.’s two-track strategy in pressing the Kim regime even more ― tightening sanctions on Pyongyang’s development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) while raising global awareness of the regime’s human rights violations.
A series of revelations showed that the North Korean laborers are taken to other countries and forced to work in extreme conditions to prop up the cash-strapped regime’s development of WMDs.
Park Won-gon, an international relations professor at Handong University, predicts that the a possible U.N. human rights resolution may be effective in “inducing” international companies to refrain from hiring North Koreans and stop renewing contracts with their current employees of the isolated authoritarian state.
The exact number of laborers dispatched by the secretive state is yet to be confirmed although international human rights activists have been trying to figure it out.
Willy Fautre, the director of Human Rights Without Frontiers (HRWF), estimated that there are at least 50,000 North Koreans in 16 countries.
Oh Gyeong-seob, deputy director of the Center for North Korean Human Rights Studies at the Korea Institute of National Unification, speculated that Pyongyang has up to 120,000 workers in 20 to 40 countries.
Many of them work in China and Russia while others are believed to be in Algeria, Angola, Cambodia, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nigeria, Oman, Poland, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
Some analysts predicted that the laborers earn an average of $120 to $150 per month each and funnel around $500 million to $1 billion in total to the Kim regime every month.
The workers, both male and female, vary in their jobs, including construction laborers, lumberjacks, sewer workers and waitresses at restaurants operated by North Korea.
Many of them work overtime and are exposed to safety hazards, but are still required to turn in their earnings to their supervisors regularly.
Some 40 North Korean workers have died in workplace accidents, according to the sources.
In October 2015, Marzuki Darusman, then-U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in North Korea, said the employers hiring North Korean workers have “become complicit in an unacceptable system of forced labor.”
Citing Darusman, Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se called for investigation into the link between Pyongyang’s development of WMDs and North Korean human rights in a U.N. speech in March.